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2. Quity: ‘We were given a new life’

We were given a new life

by the American Dream

we took over Florida

making all our fans scream.

It took a long time, but the fog finally lifted. My daughter woke me up, all mine that morning like never before and like so few times after, stomping joyfully inside me. I began to feel like I too was floating in a warm bright fluid: the only shadows were the soft and restless shapes cast by the willow branches that combed the air between my window and the river.

‘Good morning, Quity, my love!’ Cleo was beginning to appear. Sweet and chatty as she is, she never appears out of nowhere: you always know she’s coming. This morning she was all domesticity with mate and pastries, and I first heard her, then smelled her, and then finally saw her. She threw herself onto the bed and gave me a kiss, such a passionate one that her makeup smeared, one set of her fake eyelashes fell off and her Doris Day hairdo was ruined. ‘The sleeping beauty has awoken!’ she said, starting to laugh, her teeth shining. She’s pure happiness, white and radiant and queer and devout and adoring and she speaks like she’s constantly singing a bolero about a bride on her way to the altar. ‘Come, my light, my love, my wife, the three of us are having lunch at Fondeadero because I got a canoe and you and I have a lot to talk about. You’ll see, today’s going to be an unforgettable day.’

On the way there, under the bright sunlight that reflected off the river, I could sense the cold hands of my dead, with their hairless knuckles and the pain that I couldn’t stop imagining, the solitary agony of a five-year-old boy, tugging at me. I felt like a traitor for making the survivor’s mistake of carrying on living. But I couldn’t let go of his little dead hand. I promised I’d get revenge, knowing that as long as I was preparing the weapons I could keep him alive. I felt like I had a double pregnancy: a live daughter, growing but yet to have a face or a voice, and a dead son, with a face and a voice that were inexorably dissolving into nothingness.

That day I let myself be carried along by the happiness of being alive. Our little daughter was doing somersaults inside me like an astronaut in an antigravity chamber and I thought that was her vote in favour of life, of the green colours of the native flora on the opposite bank and the reds and ochres of the imported trees on our side of the Canal Honda. And the river: ‘I was a river in the evening, / and the trees sighed inside me, / and the path and the grasses ended in me. / A river ran through me, a river ran through me!’ I recited the verses of Juan L. for Cleopatra and she started to speak: ‘That’s pretty, Quity, but don’t start doing evening things when it’s not even noon yet. You have to understand, my love, that they’re in heaven and we’re on earth. I know you don’t believe in heaven, even though you’re wrong because it’s real, but what you can’t argue about is that we’re on earth. And if there’s a heaven, like I know there is, you can be happy. And if not, there’s even more reason to celebrate: we have to make the most of this short while we’re alive. Feel it, Quity, feel the sun. And also, darling, we’re going to be mothers.’ ‘So what, Cleo?’ I was finally able to get a word in. ‘Now we’re entitled to tell the rest of humanity to fuck off?’ Cleopatra sighed: ‘No, Quity, you don’t have to tell anyone to fuck off, but our daughter has the right to be happy and our duty is to take care of her above all else. And yes, we can be selfish like every other mother in the world, even the Virgin says so: if it had been up to her, Jesus would’ve been a carpenter and married to Mary Magdalene. Even if she was a whore, it was better than being a messiah and marrying a cross. Because it’s better for children to live, whether or not they come back to life when they die.’ ‘I’m with you on that, Cleo,’ I said, laughing. But Cleopatra didn’t stop there. ‘The Virgin says that being alive is the best, and Achilles knew as much when he was in Hades. When that guy who took ten years to get home – what was his name? Ulysseem? When he said to him “Oh, hello, king of the dead,” Achilles answered: “Give me a break, Ulysseem: I’d rather be a slave or an indigent” – an indigent is like a poor person, Quity – “and be alive than reign over the kingdom of the dead.”’

My daughter enjoyed the speeches of the queerer of her two mothers, seeming to dance as we listened to her. As for me, they threw me into confusion. How could she cite The Odyssey almost word for word? She’d never read it in her fucking life. Where the hell did she get things like that from? Maybe the Virgin actually did exist and was into the classics as well as poor prostitutes.

‘Look, Cleo, your daughter’s moving.’ Cleo dropped her half-eaten empanada and prophetic tone and rubbed my belly: ‘Hello, princess, I’m your other mum, Cleopatra, the one who feeds the two of you, the one who’s knitting your little clothes. We’re going to leave this place, my baby.’ Cleo turned serious and resumed her prophesying: ‘We’re going to another country. You’re going to be born there, it’s a place with a lot of sun, palm trees, a green sea. The only bad part, the Virgin Saint told me, Quity, is that it’s full of gusanos.’ ‘Oh no, darling,’ I said firmly, ‘you can go ahead and tell your Virgin that there’s no way in hell I’m going to Cuba.’ ‘Quity, I said gusanos, not Cubans.’ ‘And don’t they all come from Cuba, darling?’ ‘Yes, but the gusanos are the ones that leave, Quity. Don’t play dumb.’

And here we are, in Miami, surrounded by gusanos, or worms, as if all of us who lived in the slum were condemned more or less to the same fate. Of course, these worms aren’t quite the same as the ones in the Boulogne Cemetery: the worms here in Miami are human, mostly claim to miss Cuba constantly, have lots of money and work like crazy. Most Cubans in Miami live off government subsidies in exchange for being evidence of the evils of Socialist revolutions, and all they do is get drunk, take drugs and beat their wives. Even so, you often see their wives on Eighth Street in the mornings, looking for their husbands in the dive bars where they fall like trees. After the seventh drink, the rum hits them like an axe. They begin to lose their height and balance, they run into someone, slur, stammer out a string of curses, wobble for an instant, then hit the ground and it’s over, they stay there until someone picks them up. Helena used to have to go from dive bar to dive bar as well until Torito died, but Torito wasn’t a worm and he didn’t hit Helena. They were the only other ones who followed the same route as Cleo and me: slum – massacre – Miami.

The worms follow Cleo everywhere, her and the head of the Virgin, that poor homage to the poor that’s now considered a relic. That chunk of painted cement that also survived the massacre and that Cleo lugged across America and all the way up the social ladder until we got to Miami and began to open our numerous bank accounts.

But the road was long. That bright morning on the island when we began to think only about the three of us, we went for lunch at Fondeadero dressed in what little we had. Cleo wore the clothes of the lady who owned the house, the TV talk show host diva who’d taken Cleo under her wing and given her the keys to her mansion in Tigre so she could go whenever she wanted. I put on some men’s clothes, who knows who they belonged to but they were the only things that fit me at that point in the pregnancy, which wasn’t so very far along but I was already showing. Cleo’s six-foot-two frame managed to squeeze into the clothes of the TV queen who’d been a model in her day, so my girlfriend adorned herself in tight-fitting but authentic Versace, all ruffles and animal prints. ‘Just because it’s short on me that doesn’t mean it’s any less elegant,’ she assured me from under the straight blonde wig that drove me crazy because it made her look like a cross between Doris Day and a builder. That lunch was a feast. We had spaghetti bolognese under the gaze of the immigrant great-grandfather with a gelled moustache who’d opened the restaurant at the beginning of the last century. We were about to become immigrants ourselves. The yacht arrived that day. Daniel had sent it, along with visas and passports for both of us. It took us to Montevideo. From there we went to Miami by plane, as one should. He’d changed our identities a bit: I ended up being Catalina Sánchez Quit and Cleo achieved one of her most impossible dreams: getting her name on her documents. Since then, finally and forever, her name has been Cleopatra Lobos. Lobos, meaning wolves. Sometimes when we argue, I tell her she’s a whore right down to her last name: in Ancient Rome, a wolves’ den was another way of saying a brothel. But she says it’s impossible to offend her these days. ‘Quity, my love, I’ve been through it all, nothing can humiliate me now. Especially not this moralistic fever that’s come over you since we got to Miami. You wanted me even after you saw first-hand the whore I was, so don’t come to me with this crap now, dear.’ We left with a little bit of cash, some ten thousand dollars I’d saved and another five thousand that Daniel gave us. As Cleo likes to say, ‘Money attracts money,’ and here we are with a lot of money, two rich ladies in the developed world.